Possibility of relocation to New Braunfels or San Marcos-Need your suggestions!

[ashbeeigh]

What a zombie bump. This was from 2015.

[hindsight2020]

Originally Posted by detachable arm

Yeah- NB to San Marcos sounds like a funny move. Must've been some really good stuff there.

But I'm not going to discount his NB experience. It honestly sounds about right. I know a lot of people there. It's one of the heaviest Trump-republican towns in S. Central TX. Used to be if you were white, but your skin/hair was the wrong shade, or you had the wrong eye color then you were tagged as a scary outsider weirdo person. Nowadays it has grown and diversified some as an exurb of San Antonio, and from retirees out of Houston and DFW. But a lot of it is still a xenophobic bubble. It is more harmless strange humor than anything.

As far as the "business community" goes, it is heavy on bohemian style reciprocity... for lack of better terms. A lot of payment in kind (bartering) happens instead of a pure cash flow you'd see in the big cities. A lot of that "business community" are house poor, on creative mortgage terms that would never fly in the big cities. But as long as Houston & DFW's retirees keep on driving up housing, it works for them. Honestly-- no serious businessman is gonna look there. Even with growth it is still a quintessential hill country tourist town.

Regarding pulling trains for Trump... yes, NB exposed themselves and the national news hit them hard for this. It made many locals embarrassed. BTW, looked like 1/3rd of that crowd was hot-headed machismo Mexicans. (It's not white supremacy as much as it is anti-black.) But the #1 issue is that town has a big lower middle class & relatively expensive tourist prices. With these bartering deals going on, there isn't any real opportunity created for cash to trickle down to the rest. It's why capable, individualistic people there move to SA. And nearly all the college degreed move to Houston or Dallas to earn even more, even though they politely get shunned for it.

As a transactional resident of the place, this is an excellent and up-to-date truth bomb of the facts on the ground about NB in 2021, specifically the bolded portions of your post (my emphasis) dealing with the economic profiles. The political bent is still far right, especially for my politically-homeless [in America] Nordic model leaning social-democratic household, but the drive from San Marcos to Randolph was unworkable for me. Material conditions would have not changed dramatically, but after 4 years and two electoral cycles later it is clear we would be less pariahs in SM than NB.

You're spot on, it truly is an economic Potemkin Village of a place. Seriously house-poor jurisdiction, hobbling along on the veneer of tourist trap money and upward pressure due to SA and AUS markets kicking their underclasses outward. Seguin has basically become the bedroom community of the people serving soft drinks here for money that doesn't cover a one bedroom apartment, let alone allow them to thrive in the median cost of living of the place. SH 46 might as well be the new favelas overlooking the city center; instead of tin roofs on the hills, it's precision-guided bombed-in big-box apartment complexes in the overflow grasslands of the Guadalupe, far away from any semblance of point of interest other than access to the arterial road to NB service economy jobs. And we got the traffic to show for it. Yippee!

I cringe when people tout Comal and NB ISDs as "great" districts. Maybe for RGV/border Texas comparative standards. Certainly not for even middle of the road, national name-recognition, public land grant STEM collegiate entrance and academic rigor level, they are not. Outliers don't make a median outcome. By TEAs own data (recently released on the Community Impact newspaper), the level of economic precarity within the matriculate of this city/county by percentage, and lackluster college admission/completion rates does not match the social media propaganda. Post-primary educational expectations are still low here per capita.

The German shtick is a rank anachronism anymore. This place is as german as the Alamo and my shorthair house cats are LOL. This is your typical South Central TX 50/50 generic-non-german-US-anglo and mexican american bi-nodal town. With an inconsequential assortment of stray cat non-mexican-hispanic (yours truly), asians of either cardinal direction, and other micro-minorities making up the round-off error in the total head count. Tourist trap needs their "theme" though, so might as well stick with the old name.


Lastly, in fairness to the place, my meager real estate holding (for the area median) will probably float its value for the duration of my tenure. Lord knows that's cheap living for me at the price point I locked in 2018. So credit where credit is due. Means to an end. Cheers.

[KathrynAragon]

My head hurts.